Press release 02/10/2013

£20,000 appeal launched on Crowdfunder

Sustainable Shetland is launching a nationwide campaign to raise funds for their
Judicial Review into the Scottish Ministers’ decision to grant consent for
the Viking Energy Windfarm.

The campaign, which is being launched on Friday 17th January, is being operated
entirely online through Crowdfunder.co.uk

Crowdfunding is an website which allows community groups and individuals
to raise funds for a particular cause through a system of pledges. Each
cause has a target and a time limit, and supporters are asked to pledge
funds to
reach the total. If the total is reached, the cause receives the money,
if not, the supporters are refunded in full. Incentives to support the
cause
are given, with a variety of rewards being offered to supporters for different
pledge amounts. Crowdfunder campaigns are spread by word of mouth but primarily
through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing the cause to
reach a large number of people through a variety of networks across the
country.

The Sustainable Shetland campaign aims to raise £20,000 over an eight week
period to help fund Sustainable Shetland’s challenge to the Scottish
Ministers’ appeal against the decision of Lady Clark of Calton in September
2013 to
overturn consent for the Viking Energy Windfarm.

Sustainable Shetland Chair Frank Hay said “we were amazed and humbled
by the financial support we received to fund our Judicial Review last
year.
Despite the fact that the hearing was extended from 4 days to 14, due
to circumstances outside our control, we managed to pay for it in full
through
fundraising and donation (and without major benefactor) – a total of
nearly £100,000. This shows a great strength of feeling against the Viking
Energy
Windfarm among our Members and indeed the wider Shetland community. However,
the battle is not over and we estimate that we may need to raise as much
as a further £40,000 to fund our challenge to the Ministers’ appeal.
For this reason, we believe it is time to cast our net wider. Windfarms
are
a national issue, and there are many throughout the UK who feel strongly
that
in some cases ‘big energy’ interests are damaging our environment rather
than improving it. We hope that people around the country will show their
support for our cause, which has nationwide implications regarding
large scale windfarm developments and the protection of breeding bird species.”
This may be the first crowdfunder campaign that has been undertaken in
Shetland. The campaign will be live from 10am Friday www.crowdfunder.co.uk/sustainable-shetland

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Sustainable Shetland is a campaign group formed in March 2008 in response to a proposal for a large scale wind
farm in Shetland. We believe these large industrial projects are damaging
to our environment. We believe that the Viking Energy wind farm endangers
Shetland Community Funds, project costs are underestimated and
project income grossly over stated.

We believe that the Viking Energy proposals are everything we do not need
in Shetland: they are financially risky and potentially damaging to the Shetland environment.

We want to see sustainable renewable energy projects in Shetland which
are fit for scale and fit for purpose, and provide real community benefit.

We are not an "anti windfarm" campaign. However we are strongly opposed
to the Viking wind farm proposal. Other projects will be considered
on their own merits.

We are working on updating this web site to reflect new information in
Viking Energy's planning "addendum", so at the moment some information may refer to the initial wind farm
planning application and not the addendum. We appreciate your patience
as we work on updates to this site.